As ever, it seems the longer I have to prepare something, the less likely I am to do it. I was supposed to be running a #change11 MOOC session this week – Infoskills 2.012 How to do a lot with a little – but having had it in the diary for a 6 months or so, I have, of course, done nothing to prepare for it… (I didn’t come up with the 2.012 – not sure who did?)

Anyway….over the weekend, I gave a presentation (Social Media Visualisation Hacks) that, typically, bewildered the audience with a blizzard of things that are possible when it comes to looking at social networks but that are still alien to most:

As ever, the presentation is not complete (i.e. the slides really need to be complemented by a commentary), but that’s something I hope to start working on improving – maybe starting this week…

The deck is a review – of sorts – of some of the various ways we can look at social networks and the activity that takes place within them. The slides are prompts, keys, search phrase suggestions that provide a starting point for finding out more. Many of the slides contain screenshots – and if you peer closely enough, you can often see the URL. For posts on my blog, searching with the word ouseful followed by key terms from the post title will often turn up the result on major search engines. Many of the slides identify a “hack” that is described in pseudo-tutorial form on the this blog, or on Martin Hawksey’s MASHe blog.

If all you do in Google is 2.3 keyword searches, this deck – Making the Most of Google – (though possibly a little dated by now), may give you some new ideas.

For a more formal take on infoskills for the new age, (though I need to write a critique of this from my own left-field position), see the Cambridge University Library/Arcadia Project “New Curriculum for Information Literacy (ANCIL)” project via the Arcadia project.

Mulling over @downes’ half hour post on Education as Platform: The MOOC Experience and what we can do to make it better, I see the MOOC framework as providing an element of co-ordination, pacing and a legacy resource package. For my week, I was expected(?!) to put together some readings and exercises and maybe a webinar. But I haven’t prepared anything (I tried giving a talk at Dev8D earlier this year completely unprepared (though I did have an old presentation I could have used) and it felt to me like a car crash/a disaster, so I know I do need to prep things (even though it may not seem like it if you’ve heard me speak before!;-))

But maybe that’s okay, for one week of this MOOC? The OUSeful.info blog, where you’re maybe reading this, is an ongoing presentation, with a post typically every day or so. WHen I learn something related to the general themes of this blog, I post it here, often as a partial tutorial (partial in the sense that you often have to work through the tutorial for the words to make sense – they complement the things you should be seeing on screen – if you look – as you work through the tutorial; in a sense, the tutorial posts are often second screen complements to and drivers of an activity on another screen).

I’ve personally tried registering with MOOCs a couple of times, but never completed any of the activities. Some of the MOOC related readings or activities pass my way through blogs I follow, or tweeted links that pique my interest, and sometimes I try them out. I guess I’m creating my own unstructured uncourse* daily anyway… (*uncourses complement MOOCs, sort of… They’re courses created live in partial response to feedback, but also reflecting the “teacher”‘s learning journey through a topic. Here’s an example that led to a formal OU course: Digital Worlds uncourse blog experiment. The philosophy is based on the “teacher” modelling – and documenting – a learning journey. Uncourses fully expect the “teacher” not being totally knowledgeable about the subject area, but being happy to demonstrate how they go about making sense of a topic that may well be new to them).

So… this is my #change11 offering. It’s not part of the “formal” course, (how weird does that sound?!) unless it is… As the MOOC is now in week 29, if its principles have been taken on-board, you should be starting to figure out your own distributed co-ordination mechanisms by now. Because what else will you do when the course is over? Or will it be a course that never ends, yet ceases to have a central co-ordination point?

PS if you want to chat, this blog is open to comments; you can also find me on Twitter as @psychemedia

PPS seems like I’ve had at least one critical response (via trackbacks) towards my lacksadaisical “contribution” towards my “teaching” week on the #Change11 MOOC. True. Sorry. But not. I should have kept it simple, posted my motto – identify a problem, then hack a solution to it, every day – and left it at that… It’s how I learn about this stuff… (and any teaching I receive tends to be indirect – by virtue stuff other folk have published that I’ve discovered through web search, (aka search queries – questins – that I’ve had to formulate to help me answer the problem I have identified/created…).

I’ve been following this MOOC for about a year via the newsletter that comes to me every day. I am much like Tony, in that I come in and read when I have time and follow what stimulates my interest. However, I have a much deeper interest in this. I’ve been using maps and visualizations for over 15 years to focus attention on areas of high poverty in the Chicago area and to build networks of people and information that would result in more consistent flows of talent, dollars and ideas into all of the poverty neighborhoods.

In one of the links Tony pointed to Stephen Downes said “Solving poverty solves the problem of education, not the other way around.” To me that means adult learners need to be participating in MOOC type learning in order to better understand poverty and to learn more about how people all over the world are trying to help people out of poverty.

Thus, while I’ve been using GIS maps to show where poverty is concentrated, I’ve been using concept maps to show the range of information in my library. http://tinyurl.com/TMC-library-CMap

This map has four sections and one points to a section titled “process improvement, etc” in which I point to more than 200 sites where idea leaders talk about creativity, innovation, knowledge management, visualization,etc.

I feel that if a MOOC can point people to these ideas people who learn them over a period of years can apply what the learn to the other sections of the library which show where and why tutor/mentor programs are needed, and also show ways non profits, for profits, media, etc. can work collectively over many years to help more kids grow to adults with the skills, network and habits that enable them to raise their own kids out of poverty.

I hope that some of those who join this MOOC will move over to where I am any provide time and talent to help me duplicate this process in my own network of purpose.